1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a machine translation system for using a translation template in the format of bilingual pair of sentences which contain variables which can be replaced with various words or phrases. More specifically, the invention relates to a translation template learning method and translation template learning system for inputting bilingual pair of sentences and automatically generating a translation templates.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Machine translation of a natural language sentence is realized, as indicated in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 58-40684, by a process of source language analysis and target language generation. The elements of intermediate expression obtained by analysis of the source language sentence are words constituting the source language sentence or concepts expressed by words constituting the source language sentence. A target language sentence is generated by assigning the corresponding word of the target language to each element of the intermediate expression. The above method generates a word-for-word translation and has a disadvantage that it is difficult in principle to obtain a translation which is less dependent of the wording and structure of the source language sentence.
As a method for covering up the above disadvantage, a method for using a template, that is a bilingual pair of sentences containing variable parts. The variable parts are translated by the conventional machine translation method, though the other parts are translated by dead copy of the template. The parts other than the variable parts do not necessarily have correspondence at the word level. A translation method using a template is indicated in, for example, Japanese Patent Examined Publication No. 1-58545 and Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 3-116273.
In the case of the above translation template, it is necessary to prepare a bilingual pair of sentences and manually specify variable parts. Furthermore, it is troublesome and difficult to input many translation templates.